Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

Despite a simple and compelling premise (a man frames himself to expose injustice), Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is not a film for every noir fan. In his final American film, director Fritz Lang adopts an unusually clinical style, almost Bressonian, as if each scene is to be inspected like evidence: deliberative pacing, prosaic cinematography, somewhat mechanical acting and an avoidance of emotion (one character’s grief at her father’s sudden death is practically nonexistent). Thematically, the film exposes the moral risks of capital punishment through the concoction of a wild journalistic scheme: newspaper editor Austin Spencer (Sidney Blackmer) persuades his top reporter Tom Garrett (Dana Andrews), who’s currently on book leave, to plant evidence in an open investigation of the murder of a burlesque dancer, implicating himself and enduring the arrest, trial, and death sentence, only to reveal the truth at the last minute for a sensational story. Not surprisingly, things don’t go as planned. Joan Fontaine is top billed as Susan, Spencer’s daughter and Garrett’s girlfriend, but she’s given very little to do, while Barbara Nichols steals the female spotlight as Dolly Moore, the victim’s tough-talking, gun-snapping friend. Lang doesn’t quite go for suspense here, but the plot twists pile up toward the end, providing a satisfying, if not entirely plausible, ending.